Guild Wars 2

Hi I’d like to make a bunch of threads to sort suggestions for future readers and Devs.
If you have a better suggestion or would like to discuss suggestions feel free but keep it polite and constructive not defensive so people find it interesting to read.

Another fairly solid spec with a more defence focused kitten nal. Most of the community know it because of Pure of Voice one of guardians’ most powerful condi counters but even Writ of Persistence is used in Raids and Force of Will in more casual dungeons and fractals as a safety net. In all this is a well built spec in my opinion. The only major change I suggest is accepting Hammer back into Honor where it belongs

Most people suggest swapping the Staff and Hammer trait positions but if you view the Virtues feedback thread you can see I would rather leave virtues with no weapon. In my opinion it wouldn’t be too far to simply combine Honorable Staff and Glacial Heart. Alone these traits are under used and they don’t have enough synergy to make them overpowered together so in my opinion this is a good solution.

I don’t have many ideas for this one so I leave it open to others.
Looking forward to other people’s suggestions.

It’s a really tough if hammer was to get moved into another trait line.
Virtues are nice but hammer competed with 2 too good traits, and hammer trait itself is too weak to pick so it should either change places in Virtues or get moved into Honor or Valor.
Honor and Zeal are potential symbol boosting traitlines.
Though in hammer thread I was sure about removing the symbol, now I see that it has to stay as it is the very flavour of this weapon that is quite helpful if traited well.
I am still torn between valor and honor due to being a meditation guardian and I really enjoy it but I might think that honor will work out better.
As for traits:

Major adept: Invigorated Bulwark - This ability could get merged with glacial heart and be renamed to something like “Blunt judgement” and instead of chill proc, make hammer symbol an ice field along with 20% cooldown reduction to both mace and hammer (this could work out great with writ).

Major Master: Pure of Heart - The heal is very weak for such a situational passive, it should be relevant for us to pick during every encounter not only for shelter and aegis. Yes there are possibilities to make it more frequent like as I mentioned, empowering shelter if you get bursted, using F3 and then renewed focus to F3 again but the question is… is anyone really going to do that ? It’s not worth it so this passive should get dank, because why not ? We really need a little sprinkle of sustain passives.
People say that guardians are already good at sustaining themselves, but only with traited shouts and medis and nothing else. Even then, we have to (watch out, cruicial word here) ACTIVATE it to save ourselves. (It’s for another thread but i’d like to mention how many passive boons elementalists get just for swapping attunements or popping few skills that flood their UI with all of those sweet boons).
There are two ideas, though one will definitely get ignored but heck:
1. As long as we have aegis, we get 25% running speed (we won’t get it cause we got perma swiftness with staff and retreat)
2. If our aegis gets destroyed, it shatters and randomly drops 5 pieces of aegis (just like fragments of faith) that heals us or our allies for 200 health for each fragment and grants protection for 2 seconds for each piece, stacks duration.

Last but not least
Major Grandmaster: Writ of Persistence - It might be too much but I think that for the sake of viability of symbols we should really have it ! This is: symbols move along with us.

Minors

Selfless Daring: Increase both the base and scaling. This is the only dodge trait in the game that actually requires heavy investment to be useful.(Like virtue’s)

Purity of Body: Overhaul completely, nothing stacks higher than 50% from vigor so this is redundant and it encourages you to never use your Resolve Virtue.

Majors

-Merge Invigorated Bulwark with Protector’s impact

-Honorable staff: Have it be 20% boon duration regardless of what weapon you’re in.

-Pure of Heart: Change to Regen stacks instead of burst healing.

-Empowering Might: Remove the ICD, increase duration to 8 seconds.

-Writ of Persistence should be in zeal, not sure what to put in its place.

-Force of Will: uh….

Honor is the healing line, as such, I don’t really see why the hammer belongs there. Honor also already has two weapon traits in it.
I think Glacial Heart should be moved to Valor since its current positions in Virtues makes it futilely compete with Absolute Resolution.

The only other thing I’d change about Honor is perhaps moving Pure of Voice elsewhere (perhaps to Virtues) since I don’t think it should be competing with something like Force of Will.

Honor is a mess, seemingly a collection of traits which didn’t fit anywhere else. It’s the group support trait line, but it needs to do more than just defensive stuff and needs to be more than just healing. For the healing it does, a lot is dependent on healing power, but it provides few bonuses to it.

General

• Symbol traits should all be in Zeal. This won’t hurt use of Writ of Persistence in PvE, since Zeal is commonly used in PvE. For PvP/WvW, it’s not that useful and newer, better traits could be added to Honor.
• Need some kind of healing power conversion or source. This is preferable to just raising coefficients across the board.
• Need offensive support as well as defensive. Ideally should allow for both styles of play (Zealot gear use, for example).
• Staff is the only full support weapon. Hammer and mace have some, but also have offense. Instead of looking at a specific weapon, consider commonality.
• The shout trait is arguably better in Virtues and Consecrations trait here. Honor seems more about staying with your group, but shouts also cater to a more independent play style.
• Staff needs the boons it provides increased in duration baseline.

Minor

• Vigorous Precision: Unchanged
• Selfless Daring: Increase base to 300ish, lower coefficient to 0.7 (slightly weaker at very high healing values, stronger at lower ones)
• Pure of Heart: Same as current, but is a minor. Remember that Aegis you apply to allies heals those allies when it’s removed.

Major 1

• Protective Reviver. Consider having it reset virtues instead of granting boons.
• Activating an elite skill grants you and nearby allies 3x stability for 5s. “Feel my Wrath!” is often used for reviving, so it helps there and allows it to compete with Protective Reviver. It also provides benefit to the Signet of Courage active. It’s not bad on the other elites either.
• TBD

Major 2
This is an offensive support slot

• Empowering Might: Needs some kind of limitation to prevent ridiculous stacks from Whirling Wrath in PvE, but right now it’s too strict. Need to allow might stacking from overlapping effects (e.g. symbol tick and normal attack) and bonuses for hitting multiple enemies, but not have it stack through the roof. Reaper had some per-enemy or per-attack limits on its Chilling Victory trait, so that’s a possible solution. With this change, probably need to take another look at Altruistic Healing and have it not benefit from might, but increase the healing per boon. Otherwise, healing is a bit over the top.
• Wards (Staff#5, Hammer #5, Longbow#5?) immobilize and slow enemies who attempt to cross, in addition to knocking them down. Allies near you gain fury 5s for each enemy affected (1s cooldown for the fury effect). Addresses problems where players who are running collide with the ward and end up on the other side after the knockdown, even though they’re not supposed to be able to pass.
• TBD

Major 3
Powerful defensive support slot.

• Pure of Voice or an Improved Master of Consecrations. Consecrations, when improved enough to make you want to stay in them, will be very powerful group abilities for an area.
• Force of Will: Becomes a conversion trait converting healing power to vitality and increasing healing on other allies by a fixed percent. Specifically targeted toward Zealot, Cleric, and Crusader stat sets. Don’t ever expect to see Nomad in PvP.
• TBD

Over all honor is fairly good as far as guardian trait lines are concerned.

It does have a few hiccups however.

Protectors Impact is well, useless. Just delete it and create something else.

Empowering Might The duration could stand to be a bit longer.

Purity of Body Really should be in the virtues trait line

If purity of body were moved it would be nice to have a 3rd minor that increases boon duration since honor primarily deals with shouts.

I’d like to remind people in this and the Zeal thread that each spec would ideally have 3 themes, and focusing too hard on one is not beneficial to the theme.
For example I think there should be 3 different specs that focus on Symbols, one that increase damaging aspects Zeal, one that increase utility aspects Honor, and one that gives more options by tying symbols to a utility(radiance thread for my suggestion)
Same with block in my opinion there should be 3 specs affecting block in a major way, one for offence(unscathed contender grants 20% more damage to any ally that has your aegis and for 5s after it pops, moved to GM, Honor or Valor) one for defence Communal Defences, and one for Aegis on utilities(signets seem good too)

If you suggest moving Writ of persistence to Zeal, explain why there would be a healing trait in Zeal? And if you think that could be dropped then you probably haven’t tried tanking or heal supporting in raids as that is a must have aspect.
Larger symbols is a utility aspect to symbols so in my opinion should stay in Honor.

Having 3 different specs for symbols spreads it too thin I think. You tend to only have one focus per each skill so it helps the profession focus on other aspects. And the argument as to why would there be healing in Zeal? Look at Zealous Blade, it has a pitiful amount of healing but it’s still healing.

Edit: Even WoP’s heal is pitiful at a base of 107. While going from 0-1375 Healing Power it only goes up to 210, this is terrible scaling(not as bad as Zealous blade’s).